1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to analyzing information in documents such as payment instruments. Certain embodiments relate to computer-implemented systems and methods for analyzing and assessing documents.
2. Description of the Related Art
Fraud related to forgery of documents, such as checks, has increased steadily worldwide over the past few years. For example, in Europe fraud has doubled in the past two years. This is a very difficult problem mainly because of the wide range of techniques used to reroute money from an account to a fraudulent account. Fraud may be found in any document-based business where money transfers take place. There has been a significant amount of effort applied in developing technology, such as signature verification, for assessing forgeries in financial documents.
Many financial institutions, such as banks, are required to keep copies of processed financial documents for a long period of time, for example, months, and even years. Such institutions commonly employ image-based financial document systems that store images of processed documents in the form of images on a database on a computer system.
Databases including images depicting handwriting known to be authentic are an important resource for methods and systems of assessing forgery. A handwriting sample of unknown validity, such as a signature, may be compared to images in such a database to determine if the handwriting sample is a forgery. However, such a process may be difficult and expensive if the database includes a very large amount of image data. In addition, many methods and systems for assessing forgery in financial documents focus on assessing forgery in a limited portion of the document, for example, of a signature. Such methods and systems may lead to a large number of financial documents being incorrectly labeled as containing forgeries, as well as failing to identify forged contents in non-signature portions of a document.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,157,731 Hu et al. discloses a signature verification method and is incorporated by reference as if fully set forth herein. The method involves segmenting a smoothed and normalized signature and, for each segment, evaluating at least one local feature to obtain a feature value vector.
A method and system of recognizing handwritten words in scanned documents is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,108,444 to Syeda-Mahmood and is incorporated by reference as if fully set forth herein. A method of detecting and recognizing handwritten words is described. The applications described in the patent are directed to the use of handwriting recognition algorithms as part of keyword searches.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,084,985 to Dolfing et al. discloses a method for on-line handwriting recognition and is incorporated by reference as if fully set forth herein. The method employs feature vectors based on aggregated observations.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,995,953 to Rindtorff et al. discloses a method of comparing handwriting and signatures and is incorporated by reference as if fully set forth herein. The method relies on comparison of features of a signature rather than the images of signatures.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,909,500 to Moore discloses a method of signature verification and is incorporated by reference as if fully set forth herein. The method is based on analysis of the environs attendant to the signature string.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,710,916 to Barbara et al. discloses a method and apparatus for similarity matching of handwritten data objects and is incorporated by reference as if fully set forth herein.
A method of signature verification is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,828,772 to Kashi et al. The method compares the numerical values of parameters evaluated on a trial signature with stored reference data derived from previously entered reference signatures.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,680,470 to Moussa et al. discloses a method of automated signature verification and is incorporated by reference as if fully set forth herein. In the method, a test signature, for example, a signature entered by an operator, may be preprocessed and examined for test features. The test features may be compared against features of a set of template signatures, and verified in response to the presence or absence of the test features in the template signatures.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,454,046 to Carman discloses a universal handwriting recognition system and is incorporated by reference as if fully set forth herein. The system converts user-entered time ordered stroke sequences into computer readable text.